1928 Conventions (The Hearse at Monticello)

The People's Party had been out of power for eight long years when Upton Sinclair took the oath of office on March 4, 1925, and it was immediately clear to all that the new administration would be very different from its successor. While progressives within the American Party had sought to work with businesses to achieve reform, Sinclair chose instead to fight against them. In the Fall of 1925, Sinclair convinced Congress to pass a significant minimum wage increase, the first since the Minimum Wage Act was signed into law by President Debs, and the following Spring ordered his Attorney General to bring suit against several large corporations under the Polk Anti-Trust Act. The president has also pushed for legislation to alleviate the widespread poverty found in Southern black communities, which persists in spite of the generally successful attempts to extend political rights to black citizens in the years following the Civil War. His unsuccessful attempt to nationalize the oil industry, however, was a fatal miscalculation. In the 1926 midterms, the American Party took control of both houses of Congress, setting the stage for two years of gridlock between the conservative legislature and the leftist President.

In his quest for renomination at the 1928 Populist Convention, Sinclair is opposed by Senator James Reed of Missouri, who contends that the president's focus on labor issues ignores the party's agricultural base. While Reed is moderately popular in parts of the South, Sinclair is overwhelmingly favored to win the nomination, and has been endorsed by a number of prominent Populists, including Eleanor Roosevelt and A. Phillip Randolph.

The race for the American nomination, meanwhile, is largely a three-way contest between Senators Eli Watson and Herbert Hoover and Governor Frank Lowden. While Hoover and Lowden are products of the 1926 American wave, Watson is a figure of the party establishment and the current Senate Majority Leader. Also in the running is William F. Varney, candidate of the old Prohibitionist faction, who has almost no support outside of his small caucus.

After the worst defeat of their history in 1924, the Democratic Party is collapsing. With less than two dozen members of the House of Representatives and only one member of the Senate, the party has never been less powerful, not even in the days following the Civil War. Only two candidates have stepped forward to contest the party's nomination in 1928: Congressman John W. Davis, who has emerged as the leading opponent of Sinclair's Civil Rights agenda, and former Senator Atlee Pomerene, who became a minor celebrity during the Teapot Dome Investigations of 1922. While Pomerene is seen as the slight favorite, few expect the Democrats to do seriously well in November, and many within the party have suggested merging with either the Americans or the Populists.

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